“Hmm,” said Gristhorpe. “Unhappy client, maybe? Someone he turned in to the Inland Revenue?” Nearby, a peewit sensed their closeness to its ground nest and started buzzing them, piping its high-pitched call. “One of the things we have to do is find out how honest an accountant our Mr. Rothwell was,” Gristhorpe went on. “But let’s not speculate too much yet, Alan. We don’t know if there’s anything missing, for a start. Rothwell might have had a million in gold bullion hidden away in his garage for all we know. But you’re right about the execution angle. And that means we could be dealing with something very big, big enough to contract a murder for.”
“Sir?”
At that moment, one of the SOC officers came into the garden through the back door.
Gristhorpe turned. “Yes?”
“We’ve found something, sir. In the garage. I think you’d both better come and have a look for yourselves.”
4
They followed the officer back to the brightly lit garage. Rothwell’s body had, mercifully, been taken to the morgue, where Dr. Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, would get to work on it as soon as he could. Two men from the SOC team stood by the barn door. One was holding something with a pair of tweezers and the other was peering at it closely.
“What is it?” Banks asked.
“It’s wadding, sir. From the shotgun,” said the SOCO with the tweezers. “You see, sir, you can buy commercially made shotgun cartridges, but you can also reload the shells at home. Plenty of farmers and recreational shooters do it. Saves money.”
“Is that what this bloke did?” Banks asked.
“Looks like it, sir.”
“To save money? Typical Yorkshireman. Like a Scotsman stripped of his generosity.”
“Cheeky southern bastard,” said Gristhorpe, then turned to the SOCO. “Go on, lad.”
“Well, sir, I don’t know how much you know about shotguns, but they take cartridges, not bullets.”
Banks knew that much, at least, and he suspected that Gristhorpe, from Dales farming stock, knew a heck of a lot more. But they usually found it best to let the SOCOs show off a bit.
“We’re listening,” said Gristhorpe.
Emboldened by that, the officer went on. “A shotgun shell’s made up of a primer, a charge of gunpowder and the pellets, or shot. There’s no slug and there’s no rifling in the barrel, so you can’t get any characteristic markings to trace back to the weapon. Except from the shell, of course, which bears the imprint of the firing and loading mechanisms. But we don’t have a shell. What we do have is this.” He held up the wadding. “Commercial wadding is usually made of either paper or plastic, and you can sometimes trace the shell’s manufacturer through it. But this isn’t commercial.”
“What exactly is it?” asked Banks, reaching out.
The SOCO passed him the tweezers and said, “Don’t know for certain yet, but it looks like something from a color magazine. And luckily, it’s not too badly burned inside, only charred around the edges. It’s tightly packed, but we’ll get it unfolded and straightened out when we get it to the lab, then maybe we’ll be able to tell you the name, date and page number.”
“Then all we’ll have to do is check the list of subscribers,” said Banks, “and it’ll lead us straight to our killer. Dream on.”
The SOCO laughed. “We’re not miracle workers, sir.”
“Has anyone got a magnifying glass?” Banks asked the assembly at large. “And I don’t want any bloody cracks about Sherlock Holmes.”
One of the SOCOs passed him a glass, the rectangular kind that came with the tiny-print, two-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Banks held up the wadding and examined it through the glass.
What he saw was an irregularly shaped wad of crumpled paper, no more than about an inch across at its widest point. At first he couldn’t make out anything but the blackened edge of the wadded paper but it certainly looked as if it were from some kind of magazine. He looked more closely, turning the wadding this way and that, holding it closer and further, then finally the disembodied shapes coalesced into something recognizable. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, letting his arm fall slowly to his side.
“What is it, Alan?” Gristhorpe asked.
Banks handed him the glass. “You’d better have a look for yourself,” he said. “You won’t believe me.”
Banks stood back and watched Gristhorpe scrutinize the wadding, knowing that it would be only a matter of moments before he noticed, as Banks had done, part of a pink tongue licking a dribble of semen from the tip of an erect penis.
Chapter 2
1
Traditional police wisdom has it that if a case doesn’t yield leads in the first twenty-four hours, then everyone is in for a long, tough haul. In practice, of course, the period doesn’t always turn out to be twenty-four hours; it can be twenty-three, nine, fourteen, or even forty-eight. That’s the problem: when do you scale down your efforts? The answer, Banks reminded himself as he dragged his weary bones into the “Boardroom” of Eastvale Divisional Police Headquarters at ten o’clock that morning, is that you don’t.
The Suzy Lamplugh case was a good example. It started as a missing-persons report. One lunch-time, a young woman left the estate agent’s office in Fulham, where she worked, and disappeared. Only after over a year’s intensive detective work, which resulted in more than six hundred sworn statements, thousands of interviews, 26,000 index cards and nobody knew how many man-hours, was the investigation wound down. Suzy Lamplugh was never found, either alive or dead.
By the time Banks arrived at the station, Superintendent Gristhorpe had appointed Phil Richmond Office Manager and asked him to set up the Murder Room, where all information regarding the Keith Rothwell case would be carefully indexed, cross-referenced and filed. At first, Gristhorpe thought it should be established in Fortford or Relton, close to the scene, but later decided that they had better facilities at the Eastvale station. It was only about seven miles from Fortford, anyway.
Richmond was also the only one among them who had training in the use of the HOLMES computer system – acronym for the Home Office Major Enquiry System, with a superfluous “L” for effect. HOLMES wasn’t without its problems, especially as not all the country’s police forces used the same computer languages. Still, if no developments occurred before long, Richmond ’s skill might prove useful.